Writing and maintaining firewall configurations can be challenging, even for experienced system administrators. Tools that uncover the consequences of configurations and edits to them can help sysadmins prevent subtle yet serious errors. Our tool, Margrave, offers powerful features for firewall analysis, including enumerating consequences of configuration edits, detecting overlaps and conflicts...

Due to the lack of a standardized methodology for reporting firewall performance, current datasheets are designed for marketing and provide inflated throughput measurements obtained under unrealistic scenarios. As a result, customers lack usable metrics to select a device that best meets their needs. In this paper, we develop a systematic approach to estimate the performance offered by stateful...

Firewalls are the most prevalent and important means of enforcing security policies inside networks and across organizational boundaries. However, effective and fault free firewall management in large and fast growing networks becomes increasingly more challenging. Firewall security policies are complex and their interaction with routing policies and applications further complicates policy conf...

The aim of the research is to investigate techniques that support the development of highly dependable applications in a distributed system environment. Techniques we developed include redundant task allocation, load balancing, fault-tolerant computing and communication. The application we have implemented in the system is a firewall application. The firewall runs in redundant mode. Each incomi...

Firewalls have an important role in network security. However, managing firewall policies is an extremely complex task because the large number of interacting rules in single or distributed firewalls significantly increases the possibility of policy misconfiguration and network vulnerabilities. Moreover, due to low-level representation of firewall rules, the semantic of firewall policies become...

In this project we conducted a user study of Microsoft Windows Vista Firewall: a lab study followed by a questionnaire to evaluate the usability of Vista’s personal firewall. Our results show that the main problem with Windows Vista Firewall is that many users are unable to open the Advanced Management Interface of Windows Vista Firewall. Our overall impression was that users were relatively un...

We show firewall causing directional spike propagation in a recurrent network. The firewall is inhibition that dynamically and ubiquitously emerges in a recurrent network and is selectively activated by spike propagation in a particular direction. Therefore, the dynamical firewall can control spike propagation emerging from any site in a network. Keywords— Dynamical Firewall, Directional Spike ...

An XML firewall differs from a conventional firewall because its major task is to control access to web services rather than to filter untrusted addresses. An XML firewall can effectively protect web services from being attacked by inspecting a complete XML message including its head and data segments, and rejecting unauthorized web services invocation. In this paper, we propose a formal XML fi...

Firewalls are the core elements in network security & access control. A firewall controls the flow of traffic between different areas of your network. It uses a rule set called as firewall policy for this purpose. However as the size of rule set increases, specification and verification of the firewall rules becomes complicated and error-prone. This paper serves to provide an overview of the re...